Wayfinder (2022): a wilderness that could do with more wildness (Review)

Normally, when reviewing a debut feature, it’s fruitless to look to the director’s back catalogue for comparison points. Either they’re so new that there aren’t any, or you relegate yourself to pointing out the obvious. (Try not to fall off your chair, but I think Emma Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva Baby has some connection to her 2020 feature Shiva Baby) Larry Achiampong, whose first feature Wayfinder is released in cinemas nationwide by Verve Pictures today, may be an exception. His previous work has crossed various artistic disciplines, including a permanent sculpture at Westminster Underground station he made for Transport for London. Now he’s scaling up: Wayfinder offers Transport for Britain.

Following a nameless Wanderer played by Perside Rodrigues as she treks across the country, Wayfinder fits neatly alongside the psychogeographic cinema of Andrew Kötting and Chris Petit, as well as complementing our current golden age of nature writing – think recent non-fiction bestsellers by Helen MacDonald or Robert MacFarlane. One of the most striking things Achiampong offers that those names can’t is a Black perspective on the landscape. A few literary voices, like Jini Reddy and Tim Hannigan, have questioned the ethnic and economic blind spots of travel and nature writing, but in cinematic terms, the only comparison I can think of is John Akomfrah’s superb short Peripeteia.

Akomfrah’s film imagines the lives of two portrait subjects of the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, two people who may well be the first Black faces in European art. Wayfinder also has a strong link to art history. When the Wanderer reaches London, she finds herself transported, dream-like, to the deserted National Gallery at night. She walks into the Turner exhibition, linking the film to one of its producers – Turner Contemporary, a gallery in Margate. When J.M.W. Turner’s name is linked to modern art, either in the name of this gallery or as a Prize, it’s in recognition of the bold, experimental nature of his painting and his determination to address contemporary topics through his art. In the case of Wayfinder, this means the Wanderer spends some time with his famous, polemical paintings of slave ships. She recognises their humanity and anger while also feeling alienated by the knowledge that these pictures, pictures of her people’s suffering, were intended for an audience that couldn’t be further away from her. “For whose eyes”, she asks, “did you make this?”

The National Gallery scene contains all the things I admire about Wayfinder, but also quite a few things I have reservations about. As the film goes on, the Wanderer finds herself more and more in-built environments – galleries, cafes, amusement parks, suburbs – rather than the landscapes captured so beautifully at the beginning. This wouldn’t be a problem if Achiampong reliably captured the uniqueness of each location, but despite the haunting nature of the National Gallery scene, that’s not always the case. You could argue that this is part of the point: you can travel from one end of the country to the other, but a greasy spoon is still a greasy spoon. Even so, it’s hard not to wish for more interludes like the one where the Wanderer meets Anita Neil, Britain’s first Black Olympic athlete. For a moment, you feel Achiampong relinquish a bit of control over the film’s ideas to his interviewee, and it significantly enriches the overall work.

Achiampong has more right than most to make an auteur piece. He is credited as a director, producer, soundtrack composer, drone operator and field recorder, and collaborated on the script, editing and cinematography. This establishes him as a remarkable polymath, but it can make the resulting film feel a bit airless: ironic, considering how much time it spends in the great outdoors. Where it scores strongly, unsurprisingly, is in presenting a consistent vision. The wilderness scenes that bookend the film are remarkably strong, moving at a determined, meditative pace, ravishingly shot and sensitively scored.

Rodrigues’s voiceover, too, is beautifully written and delivered, even if at times you wish Achiampong would pay more heed to his own lessons. Early on, the Wanderer reflects on the double meaning of the word ramble: “to speak in a confused way, but it’s also to walk for pleasure”. Wayfinder‘s considerable pleasures could be increased with a bit more rambling, in both senses of the word. It doesn’t have to be as chaotic as Kötting’s expeditions into similar territory; as a card-carrying super-fan, I will acknowledge that there are bomb sites less chaotic than Andrew Kötting’s work. As Wayfinder gets into the home stretch and starts talking about the devastating effects of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy, though, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing thoroughly while also thinking this was a bit didactic, and not as powerful as the more allusive early stages. There have been some remarkable British directors who’ve arrived from the world of gallery art this century, most notably Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Johnson. If Achiampong lets himself stray further from the path in future, Wayfinder establishes that he has the eye and the technical gift to join them.

Graham on Wayfinder (2022)